I noticed you asked this in several other forums as well.

I suppose that means it’s no use looking for yet more answers here, because (hopefully) you only need one single solution.

I found a “Capecoast” Ewe font … but it’s horrible!

Checking with Glyphs, I found that the capitals and lowercase characters are in normal positions, but the “special” characters are mapped to the exclamation point, dollar, asterisk and so on. If that is indeed the font that you are using, ditch it. It is not Unicode compatible and will, at some point, cause problems.

You are presumably encountering problems with Noto because this encoding is all wrong. If the encoding was right, it should definitely work. You could even use Times New Roman (a relatively modern version such as provided with Windows 10), as this has all the required characters on all the right places.

If this is the font that you are using and some of the characters appear right, that’s only because the author used the same font. Bite the bullet NOW, then, and replace each of the “wrong” characters in this font with the “real” character. Yes, that is a relatively serious amount of work, but you’ll only have to do this once.

Ah Richard, you’re in luck! You basically only have to change “cursorKeyIncrement” to “kerningKeyIncrement”. The Kerning Key Incement value is not in ViewPreferences, but in TextPreferences. Other than that, it looks pretty much the same:

app.activeDocument.textPreferences.kerningKeyIncrement = setWidth.editValue;

A few notes, though: when copying the above script, I noticed double quotes were translated to curly “smart” quotes, and scripts do not like these at all. Also, the last value in yourList is missing its quotes altogether – it will throw an error, because the dropdown list expects only text strings. Finally, Nudge values allow fractions (0.01 is fine) but Kerning accepts whole numbers only. So, you need to populate yourList with a range of acceptable values. And finally finally, you must replace the dialog title with a bad pun based on kerning, not nudging:

//DESCRIPTION:Set Kern Nudge Value
// A Jongware Script 11-May-2018
var yourList = ["1", "2", "5", "10", "20", "50"];
var val = app.activeDocument.textPreferences.kerningKeyIncrement;
var aDialog = app.dialogs.add({name:"Kern you feel it", canCancel:true});
with (aDialog)
{
  with(dialogColumns.add())
  {
    with(dialogRows.add())
    {
      staticTexts.add({staticLabel:"&Kern", minWidth:80});
      var setWidth = integerComboboxes.add({editValue:val, minWidth:100, largeNudge:10, smallNudge:1, minimumValue:1,maximumValue:100, stringList:yourList});
    }
  }
}
if (aDialog.show() == true)
    app.activeDocument.textPreferences.kerningKeyIncrement = setWidth.editValue;

Some other changes in the dialog itself: as Kerning only supports whole numbers, no need to ask for a “real” (fractional) number, “integers” (whole numbers only) are fine. The minimum and maximum allowed Kern Step values are 1–100, so best not to allow anything outside that range.

You can delete the color swatch and have it replaced with [Black].

If you don’t want to (you might have the swatches used somewhere else): click the text cursor inside a footnote with the override color. Redefine style – it’ll assign that wrong color to the style you used for footnotes. Then change the color in the style definition to [Black].

(Oops. Never mind my old question – 6p = 1 inch. You may want to know that if you are used to inches, you can change ID’s default measurement system.)

How accurate is your printer?

Alas, no. Adobe added the “paragraph shading” part from DTPUtils (great!) plugin ‘Paragraph Border’ (see https://dtputils.com/products/view/1), but not the border part. (And so it’s fun to see they actually have updated their plugin to support CC2017 as well!)
As you can see in the DTPUtils screen shot, their version allows setting the line style in the usual way. But with Adobe’s implementation, you have to resort to trickery to get any line at all.

In this fairly recent post, David shows how to get a solid line: https://creativepro.com/making-line-left-side-paragraph.php. It’s about solid lines but don’t ignore it right away, I’ll explain how it may help you later on.

Without a specific plugin, people have used various tricks through the years. David summarizes them nicely in this 2009 post: https://creativepro.com/making-a-vertical-line-to-the-side-of-a-paragraph.php

To get a dotted line, you need either the Single Cell Table trick or an anchored object; with either, you can select all available line styles.

However: if you are content with a dashed line as well, there is another way!

(1) Use the Solid Sideline trick (with Paragraph Shading) to add the line. Now you have solid lines.
(2) On your master page, add a new layer and move this on the top of all existing layers.
(3) On this layer, draw a vertical dashed line, thick enough and in the right position to cover the solid border you have now (*). Set the stroke color to white and make sure the Gap Color is “None”.

((*) Draw it on a page with a text with such a border, zoom in to verify everything fits, then cut, and Paste in Place on the Master Page.)

There are a few problems this method… First off, you can’t use it if your background already uses color. (“All the same color” would still work, but not if you may have images or bands of color.) Second, you can’t use it if you may have something else in that same border – say, some other paragraphs with a solid background. Third, you can only pull it off with dashed lines. If you try to do the same with a dotted line, you will see that you get inverted dots: a solid band with white dots, rather than the other way around.

However, if these 3 points are not a problem, then it will work ‘invisibly’, that is, even if your paragraphs move around, their borders will remain dashing.

Your request is contradicting common logic :)

Here is why.
#1. You want your text evenly spaced out, to have it justified left and right.
#2. You do not want smaller and larger spaces.

To comply to #1, every line that does not entirely fill from margin to margin MUST have some additional space left (the “common logic” part), to be distributed along that same line. But doing so immediately violates #2!

Fortunately, the thing you complain about – word spacing – is not the only option InDesign has to fill out text. Here are a couple of options you can try (and then reject – please DO read on after this list!).

a. Rewrite the text, filling each line with just enough words to comply to both #1 and #2. This is not that unusual; as Donald Knuth quotes from George Bernard Shaw, “.. ‘In his own works, whenever [William Morris] found a line that justified awkwardly, he altered the wording solely for the sake of making it look well in print” (“Breaking Paragraphs into Lines”, Software—Practice and Experience, Vol. 11 (1981)).

b. Adjust the Justification to allow less divergent Word Spacing. The default is 80/100/133; change to 100/100/100, and change the Letter Spacing to -10/0/20. This will distribute the space between the letters of the words instead of between the spaces.

c. Adjust the Justification to allow less Word Spacing as above, but leave the Letter Spacing as it is and change the Glyph Scaling.

d. Adjust the type size of each line.

For what reasons should you not use *any* of these solutions? Each of them, on their own or in combination, may do what you are asking. However,

(a) is usually out, unless you are formatting your own text. And even then you wouldn’t want to rewrite a mellifluous phrase to something less good, just to have it *look* better.

(b) is usually out, because a Worst Case Scenario is where the *letter* spacing is as large or larger than the *word* spacing. According to these rules, a phrase may appear “s p a c e d t h i s w i d e”.

(c) is sort of frowned upon. Yes, ID will comply, and you will get stretchy and shrinky lines of text, but it looks pretty awful. I see I have “100/100/100” in my own default settings, but it’s entirely possible I changed them long ago, because I seem to remember the actual defaults are something like 98/100/102.

(d) may work very well for a poster – but not for running text.

So what *is* the “proper” solution? There are only TWO reasonable solutions: either allow hyphenation, or do not justify at all.

So, that’s that? No! There is something additionally strange going on with your example. With common justification settings – it’s safe to state you most likely did not change them –, the single word “The” ought to have appeared at the end of your top line. The only reason why it would not have done so is because you used a Forced Line Break (Shift+Return) at the end of that first line, and in that case, hyphenation or not, InDesign has no choice BUT to obey you and fully justify that line. If you did this here: don’t. Either end a line with a space – and give InDesign a fighting chance to properly justify the text as good as your settings allow it – or, if the next line indeed must start a new paragraph, use a simple Return at the end.

(Disclaimer: I am heavily biased against people who are “against” hyphenation. It is a common complaint it would hinder readability – but at the same time, these people want “good looking text” as well! I say, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. No-hyphens is great for a children’s book, but proper hyphenation is perfectly normal to find in every text targeted to, oh, something like ten years and older.

As I am Dutch, I frequently hear from my clients that “the hyphenation looks plain wrong”. My usual retort to that is that they are assessing English hyphenated words with their Dutch eyes; and the Dutch system of breaking words is rather different from the English one. It’s very rare to find ID’s hyphenation algorithm fail on English text. Even when they insist to break a word “wrong”, I flat out refuse to do so and opt to NOT break the offending word at all.)